You know when straight men joke, “Backs against the wall, lads! You’d better watch that one, ‘e’s an arse bandit!”? Isn’t it just so silly? Isn’t it immature? Isn’t it presumptuous? After all, what self-regarding gay man would be interested in an icky straight man? I mean, they don’t even floss properly and probably don’t have a decent tan line. And anyway, it’s not as if they’re in dire danger of being buggered senseless when they lean over the pool table to pot a tricky ball, is it?
Well, yes, actually–if I’m in the room. You see, I’m the arse bandit they’re talking about. (And lads, my cock can drill through walls.)
Of course, I know I shouldn’t be interest in straight men. I know it’s predatory, I know it’s a sigh of self-loathing. But I can’t help myself. You see, I’m a bum man and I’ve tried loving gay men’s botties, I really have. The problem is, I can’t find them.
Really, it’s all too tragic to bear. Where their legs meet their backs, instead of a nice round, firm, double-mound of muscle that you can grab, bite, maul, slap, bounce up and down on, and play a couple of rugby games with, gay men usually have nothing but vestigal buttocks, an ancestral memory of a time when men actually walked and ran instead of taking taxis everywhere.
Would that it weren’t the case. Being a bum boy who is a bum man can be a bum rap if you don’t fancy spending it hanging around the pool halls or the prison showers.
The worst thing is so many gay me’ arses are not only flat but, like cats, without any cleavage at all. Exploring men’s bums should be like pearl diving: the jewel should be difficult to reach, requiring expert breath control and the prying apart of stiff, reluctant muscle: a precious and rare reward for skill and daring. Call me uptight, but Im a teensy bit turned off when a mans’ sphincter winks at you through his jeans and offers to buy you a drink.
There are many theories as to why gay men don’t have arses. But the most convincing one I ever heard came from a friend of mine who grew up next to a bumless gay couple in Wales. As a boy, he pondered their afflicted state and came to the understandable conclusion that their derrieres were missing because they were homosexual. All that sodomy had worn away their rears. Understandable, this discovery put back his own coming out by years.
Whether bumless wonders were born or made I cannot day. Even in the gymnasium, where we homos usually hammer our pansy bodies into the image of someone we’d quite like to pull ourselves, the bottom half is more often then not neglected–probably because in a crowded disco you can only clock the top half. But it’s all a bit self-defeating; the showy superstructure of pecs, delts, lats, and biceps is turned into a bit of a camp, cartoony joke by the paltry pins supporting it. Squats, the Holy Grail of straight male bodybuilders, are just too much like hard work, and anyway give you terrible piles (as I discovered to my horror).
Straight men’s bums, like straight men themselves (or at least the ones worth molesting), are sexy because they are the thoughtless, melony fruit of gritty, honest–and frankly stupid–labour. Arse beauty is in blank function and not design. The circumference and firmness of those featureless spheres, is perhaps, a measure of how thrillingly out of touch with his body and its pleasures and pains a straight man is, how t is subjugated to his brutish will. (Or maybe it’s just that when he was a kid he never had a letter from his mum excusing him from gym for the rest of the term because of a rare but very serious allergy to contact sports.)
Sprinting footballers, yomping squaddies, hauling hodcarriers: their arses grow and their prostates itch, entirely unaware–until they’ve had ten pints and you promise not to tell anyone. You see, straight mes bots are so sexy because straight men make the best bottoms.
Of course, there are straight men who aren’t sexy and whose arses I wouldn’t like to bit, even if they were the only beat for miles around. The vast majority of them, in fact. And, of course, wishful thinking about thoughtlessness and brutishness aside, many of the sexiest straight men are not “straight” after all. This isn’t to say that they are “really gay”–just that they’re not “really straight.” There’s a kind of polymorphous narcissism, a love of attention whatever the gender, that goes with a certain intensity of studliness.
But the bottom line–and one that most gay men seem unable to bring themselves to admin–is that the sexiest bums in the world are attached to men who aren’t gay.
Which leaves homos like me in a bit of a quandary: You’re a min who fancies men. Being pedantic, as is the modern habit, you decide you must, therefore, be gay. So you come out. Like the well-behaved, conscientious homo you are, you do everything that nice homos are supposed to do these days. You solemnly tell everyone that you fancy other men and that this is what you are, that you are “gay.” Being of a tidy mind, you then go on the gay scene in search of other men who fancy men.
But then something rather curious happens. Instead of being rewarded for your good citizenship with happiness and as many beefy-buttocks as you can chew, it slowly dawns on you that the very men with the arses that it hurts to look at and who made you realize that you were a bummer are now out of reach–that in ordering your life around you homoness, you have cut yourself off from the very thing which made you homo in the first place.
As the old fag joke has it, “What’s the definition of gay agony?” “A bottomless pit.” Or a gay bar.
Or, for that matter, a pitiful bottom.